The Chesterton
girls basketball team will need to replace about 90% of the scoring from
last year’s 21-3 team as the season begins tonight against Highland and
there are several candidates to do it.

“We have one
starter returning in Marney Sisson, but Ashley Craycraft got a lot of
minutes for us,” long-time Chesterton coach Jack Campbell said. “We played
about 30 games this summer with the kids that are basically varsity. We have
a pretty good idea of what our positives and negatives are.”

Leading the list of
positives, and maybe the most important, is the effort the Trojans will
bring to the floor.

“They will play
hard and I think they’ll execute what we are asking them to do,” Campbell
said. “They’ll certainly do the things they can do. We’ll try to control the
things we can, and then, it’s just putting everything together.”

Chesterton will
have to overcome a lack of size with 5-foot-10 Sisson as the tallest player
on the varsity roster.

“We aren’t very
big,” Campbell said. “We’ll have to play defense really well and block out
on the backboards. When you aren’t big, you better be good at the other
things.”

Defensively, the
Trojans will still play the 1-3-1 they are known for, but will mix things
up.

“We’ll mix up
things defensively,” Campbell said. “I think we’ll be a pretty good
man-to-man team. Most of the time it’ll be determined by who we are playing.
It’s not so much what you are doing, as it is how they are handling what you
are doing.”

When the Trojans
take the floor for the first time tonight, Sisson and Craycraft will be
joined in the lineup by seniors Haley Moore and Molly Slatcoff, along with
sophomore Nalani Malackowski.

“We’ll start
basically three guards and the fourth one could be,” Campbell said. “We
expect that all five can play multiple positions and they played the most
minutes over the summer. They are a pretty cohesive group.”